Life moves slowly in Montana. I moved here July 21, 2009, and was at first expecting that I would make it a couple of months, at most. I thought that the first winter would leave me crazy to leave, as it had when I first moved here, ten years ago. I am now entering my second winter here. It is currently -13C, at the warmest time of day. This does not bother me as much as I might have guessed it would have.
There are a few secrets of how I have managed to keep my sanity. One of them is that the time since I moved here has been one of the most literary times of my life. While I have always been a reader, I have turned it up to 11 the past year, reading large parts of the canon that have so far eluded me. I've read Romance of the Three Kingdoms, War and Peace, The Brothers Karamazov, The Great Gatsby, Swann's Way, Anathem, A Confederacy of Dunces, You Can't Go Home Again, The Magicians, Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, Fear and Trembling, Flatland, Dance Dance Dance, V For Vendetta, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, The Time Traveler's Wife and I even read Twilight. And those are just the familiar books, I've also read a great deal of random paperbacks. Of course, that wasn't even my point, I just got busy bragging about all the books I've read. I get that way with books.
The other way that I keep myself occupied, and the point of what I am writing about here, is that I have become much more in tuned with the natural world around me. I have always been aware of the natural world, but I am now immersed in it. The area I live has some unique qualities about it. Although a more seasoned geologist might correct me on this, I am in between two separate mountain ranges, the high, rocky, Cretaceous Bitterroot Range, and the low, rounded pre-Cambrian Sapphire Mountains. I don't know of any other place where two mountain ranges that are so diverse in geology and biology are within a dozen miles of each other. I can ride my bicycle out a dozen miles and be in a unique ecosystem. Things that may have provoked a reaction of mild interest now seem to have more immediacy --- things such as the first yellowing of the larches high in the mountains in September.
Wishing to have some record of the small, subtle changes that constantly back up the background to my life, sometime in August I started taking the same photograph every day. It showed, in the foreground, my front yard, and further away, the high peaks of the Bitterroot. I at first hoped to make a time elapse movie of these pictures. The pictures were slightly off center from one each other to make a good time elapse movie, so I instead started a flickr account to display them. And this is the lead-in to my plug of my flickr account, which can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/55867946@N03/sets/72157625377553492/with/5183352763/
(As an exercise to the reader, it is left to explain why flickr has the most confusing and long URLs ever.)
This is probably a niche interest, but I find it very interesting, especially when I go back over the pictures and realize certain things. Such as that even in the high days of summer, cloud cover is more extensive and more varied than I would think. And also, that the changing of leaves is not a totally gradual process: they are green for a long time, and then turn noticeably yellow in a few days. Some of these are curiosities, while some of them are a great source of meteorological and biological data. I will continue to update these pictures as the rules of flickr and as my time allow. Hopefully they will become complete enough to show an entire year's cycle of seasons.